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Israel’s defence minister has pledged to resettle northern Gaza, in comments that ran counter to the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration as the leaders of the two countries prepare to meet.

Israel Katz said that “God willing . . . we will build in north Gaza” by bringing in military units from the Nahal brigade — which also specialises in establishing new communities — to replace the “settlements that were uprooted” during Israel’s 2005 disengagement from the Palestinian enclave.

“We will do this in the right way, at the right time,” Katz said on Tuesday at a ceremony in the settlement of Bet El, in the occupied West Bank, to mark the impending construction of more than 1,000 new housing units.

Hours later Katz’s office issued a statement saying the remarks were made “in a security context only”, and that the Israeli “government has no intention of establishing a settlement in the Gaza Strip”.

Katz had also rejected any move to withdraw from even “one millimetre” of occupied Syria, in another remark contradicting the Trump administration’s approach.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to meet Trump next Monday in Florida for crunch talks on Gaza and other regional issues, including Syria and Lebanon.

Washington has prioritised pushing ahead with the next phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal it helped broker in October between Israel and Hamas, drawing a halt to two years of war.

The truce has largely held so far, despite near-daily clashes between the two sides amid mutual accusations of violations.

Katz’s initial comments were not in accordance with Trump’s own 20-point plan that underpins the Gaza ceasefire. The plan includes an eventual Israeli withdrawal from much of the war-shattered territory and a rejection of any new settlement construction in the strip.

Israel still holds roughly half of Gaza, with its forces deployed along the so-called Yellow Line that bisects the strip from north to south.

The ceasefire deal’s “phase two” calls for the deployment of an international peacekeeping force into Gaza, the pullback of Israeli troops from the Yellow Line and the establishment of a new governing structure.

But Katz said: “We are present deep inside Gaza and we will never leave all of Gaza. There will never be something like that.”

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Katz, a senior official from Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud party, also took a veiled swipe at the Trump administration’s approach to Syria and its new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who seized power last year from the long-ruling regime of Bashar al-Assad.

In the wake of Damascus’s fall to Sharaa’s forces in December 2024, Israel seized wide swaths of south-western Syria and created a de facto “security zone” which it has demanded should remain demilitarised.

US envoys have since last summer attempted to broker a renewed security agreement between Israel and Syria, which would require Israel to withdraw its forces from newly occupied Syrian land. So far that effort has not borne fruit.

“We don’t trust anyone and no one should tell us [stories]. No agreement. We will not move one millimetre in Syria,” Katz said on Tuesday.

Referring to Sharaa and his convivial meeting with Trump at the White House last month, Katz said: “They can say ‘[he put on] suits and they put perfume on him’. We will not allow threats.”